Spec Ops‘ handsomely bearded writing lead, Walt Williams, talks about the personalities that make up Spec Ops: The Line’s team – both player and non-player characters – in a new development diary installment, which you can see below. Williams claims that the moral choices in the game are “about holding up a mirror to yourself”, which in my case would reveal a tired-looking man with a serious head-cold and a dire need of a haircut. I am not sure what that says about my morals, but I suppose I could do with looking in a mirror once in a while.

Anyway, clickwards for what might be a bit of a spoilery dev diary. Mr Meer is playing Spec Ops: The Line RIGHT NOW for his ultimate verdict.

I’m actually fairly intrigued by this. I know it’s just another grimdark desert manshoot, but between the noises Alec is making as he plays, and the interview with the team that we previously ran, I think this might be worth a visit to that territory.

Isn’t this game being over-covered or something? This is like the millionth news item about it, and there were a plethora of interviews. Seems odd to see the RPS writers so attracted to what seems (to me, at a glance) to be a relatively generic, “safe” shooter.

I selected those examples subjectively. Basically they’re titles for which there were a higher-than-average number of articles written. They’re also games that had articles that made me think, “Man, is that really news?” Things like having a full-up articles every time a new mod for Skyrim came out or every time the servers went down for Diablo.

The RPS staff has more than once made a point to remind people it’s a blog (at least first and foremost) and not a “news site”, so asking what I “expect them to do if new information/videos/interview opportunities come about” is nonsensical – They don’t post it just because it’s new, they post it because it caught their eye.

That, and the volume of coverage this game is getting, leads me to believe that the RPS writers, are, indeed, greatly interested by this muddy, stale-looking desert shooter that nobody will talk about after it gets released, ever. Different strokes I guess. Yuck

Never said I had a problem with their coverage of those topics, “over-coverage” is probably the wrong word. Just pointing out that there are games that have received substantially more coverage than this one.

It’s very odd that it’s tickling RPS’s fancy so intensely, though. This interest, tons of news items and coverage, all over some “we show the horrors of war/no john YOU are the demons” hype? It still looks like a run of the mill TPS to me, and I’ll eat crow if that’s not exactly what it ends up being

See, that’s what I thought it was too, and so I’ve been completely ignoring it, but in the last week I’ve had Eurogamer, PC Gamer UK and RPS all go “WAIT IT’S NOT LIKE THAT AS MUCH AS YOU THINK” and so now suddenly I’m interested.

I think they have utterly, utterly fouled the marketing on this – generic CoD clone seems to be the PR, but that seems to be pretty misleading.

Given that there’s so little interest in the comments, I wonder if this isn’t a case of PR ruining the chances of a game actually selling.

I’m not finished with it, but so far it’s actually a decent story-based manshooter. The characters are more engaging then any other manshooter I’ve played since Bad Company 2.

It reminds me a lot of Max Payne 2, honestly in that it’s a decent runandgun game which isn’t about running and gunning. So far it has done a good job of showing some real horror without seeming too exploitative. No. “Lol, rivers of blood, lol!

And it’s provided a few good scares, too. Visually it reminds me a lot of Bulletstorm, though in general is comes off as Call of Duty + Bioshock.

I also really like the unobtrusive bullettime mechanic.

Where I stand now, if it can stick the landing, it might hold up as a cult game. Or just another interesting failure. But I’ll take flawed and interesting any day over perfect and risk-free.